Roosters have reason to crow
CD Review
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Toolbox
By ART EDELSTEIN Arts Correspondent - Published: December 4, 2009
The Stone Cold Roosters are too good a band to be as obscure as they currently are. I can make this comment after several listenings to their sophomore recording effort "Anywhere West." Last year's "Out Of the Woods" was so good that we gave it a Tammie award for best country album.
Sophomore efforts often fall flat because there is not enough juice to sustain another after the initial effort. Not in this instance. If "Out of the Woods" was really good, "Anywhere West" is even better. From the opening cut, the tongue in cheek "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," a George Jones-style got-drunk-and-screwed-up theme, to the final 14th track, "Scattered," the Roosters give us 52 minutes of well-crafted songs played by top Vermont professionals.
I'll reiterate what I wrote last year: This is essentially an all-star cast. The band seems to be bent on one thing, having fun.
The credit here goes to the whole ensemble, but especially Colin McCaffrey, our local musical everyman. He put this fine band together, wrote a couple of the songs, sings, plays guitar, mandolin, and other instruments and also did the recording and much of the production.
Beyond McCaffrey, however, there's a very talented band and some great songwriters. Thal Aylward on violin, Roy Cutler on vocals and drums, Casey Dennis, the bass player, Chuck Eller on keyboards, Ted Mortimer on vocals and electric guitar and Jim Pitman on vocals and steel guitar are as good as you get in the Vermont musical constellation. These guys have played in many bands and together have decades of music under their belt. They play with authority and swing. They also write great songs.
Dennis, Mortimer, Cutler, and Pitman each contribute songs on their own or in collaboration with other band members. The range is from country to swing with some LA country rock also in there.
The title track "Anywhere West" by McCaffrey and Cutler should get lots of radio airplay, it's tuneful and interesting with a catchy Nashville-style hook that might grab the attention of the big league country crowd.
That song is followed two tracks later by the humorous "I Put My Foot in It," and they deserve credit for including a song, which references the travails of dealing with unwanted dog products. Last year's CD also had a funny scatological song "Happy as a Pig in S**t," so this band seems to have a recurring theme to its music.
The only oddly placed entry on this fine album is Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain." Frankly, the Roosters didn't need to cover anybody to show their musical gravitas. "Sugar Mountain" isn't necessarily one of Young's best, although McCaffrey sings it nicely. Here's an instance where the track space might have been better filled by another band-penned song.
"Anywhere West" is just too good an album to sit in obscurity hawked by the band at its all too infrequent live gigs. The Stone Cold Roosters need to take this music on the road, beyond Vermont's borders, where it will get lots more airplay and the band gets much more recognition for its abilities.